lead nurturingLead nurturing is one of the most important functions of sales and marketing, and yet it somehow often gets overlooked. It’s a good idea to always be checking to make sure that your lead nurturing programs are in place and that they are working, so that no leads get lost. Sometimes, even when you are able to identify a problem in your lead management process or realize an opportunity to increase sales, the higher ups aren’t too keen on the idea of spending more money to make money. That’s why we’re arming you with the biggest list of statistics about lead nurturing. With this list, you can convince anyone (even the CEO!) of the absolute necessity of a strong lead nurturing program.

For more information about how a lead nurturing program with marketing automation can have a profound effect on sales, read this case study.

LEAD GENERATION

  1. Companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7x more leads than those with fewer than 10. (HubSpot)
  1. 47% of B2B marketers say they either close fewer than 4% of all marketing-generated leads, or they don’t even know this metric. (Forrester Research)
  2. Event-triggered marketing can potentially save 80% of your direct mail budget. (Gartner Research)
    1. 12% of leads from large companies are from SEO, but they are only allocating 9% of their budget towards this source. 11% of their leads are from traditional advertising, but they are allocating 15% of their budget to this lead source. (Hubspot)
  1. 48% of marketers build a new landing page for each marketing campaign. (MarketingSherpa)
  2. 48% of offers have multiple offers on them. (MarketingSherpa)
  3. Businesses with 31 to 40 landing pages got 7 times more leads than those with only 1 to 5 landing pages. (HubSpot)
  4. Those with over 40 landing pages got 12 times more leads than those with only 1 to 5 landing pages. (HubSpot)

LEAD NURTURING

Time to woo your leads into buying. Hint: no shouting, yelling, broken-record repeating, or nagging cold calls. Want to know how to make your leads fall in love with your company? Read “How to Get Your Leads to Say I Do”. The best part is, there’s tons of love-is-in the air inspiring pictures to complement the marketing concepts.

  1. 50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy. (Gleanster Research)
  2. Only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales. (Gleanster Research)
  3. 65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing. (MarketingSherpa)
  4. 56% of B2B organizations verify valid business leads before they are passed to sales. (MarketingSherpa)
  5. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (Source: DemandGen Report)

SALES

Who doesn’t want to make a sale? It’s hard to be in trouble with your boss when you’re increasing sales.

  1. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales at 33% lower cost. (Forrester Research)
  2. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (The Annuitas Group)
  3. Companies with mature lead generation and management practices have a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement. (CSO Insights)
  4. 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. (InsideSales)
  5. 79% of market leads never convert to sales. (MarketingSherpa)
  6. 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. (MarketingSherpa)
  7. The average sales cycle has increased 22% over the past 5 years due to more decision makers involved in the buying process. That means more intricate lead nurturing towards more stakeholders. (Sirius Decisions)

LEAD SCORING

Stop wasting your time on useless leads that will never go anywhere!

  1. 65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing. (MarketingSherpa)
  2. 79% of B2B marketers have not established lead scoring. (MarketingSherpa)
  3. 68% of B2B organizations have not identified their funnel. (MarketingSherpa)
  4. 57% of B2B organizations identify converting qualified leads into paying customers as a top funnel priority. (MarketingSherpa)

MARKETING AUTOMATION

Because you’re never going to be up at all hours of the night to be shooting out emails!

  1. Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months. (Gartner Research)
  2. Marketing automation users report 3x more leads passed to sales after one month. (Marketo)
  3. Jeff Ernst of Forrester Research, Inc., estimates that only about 5% of marketers use a full-featured marketing automation solution (Forrester Research)
  4. 59% of CMOs expect to increase effectiveness and efficiency of marketing by implementing automated marketing solutions. (Bulldog Solutions)
  5. The B2B marketing automation industry will reach $325 million in revenue by the end of 2011. This is a more than 50% increase over 2010, which had also doubled in revenue from the year before. (Raab Associates)
  6. Marketing automation has seen the fastest growth of any CRM-related segment in the last 5 years. (Focus Research)
  7. Lead nurturing reduces the % of marketing generated leads ignored by sales (from as high as 80% to as low as 25%). (Bulldog Solutions)
  8. By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationships without talking to a human. (Gartner Research)
  9. 81% of best-in-class companies list “wanting to close sales faster” as their number one reason for implementing marketing automation. (Focus Research)
  10. Companies that invest in marketing automation solutions see 70% faster sales cycle times, and 54% improvement in quota achievement. (Bulldog Solutions)
  11. Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (The Annuitas Group)
  12. Marketing automation provides a 225% increase in volume of prospects that convert to sales opportunities. (SHIPSERV)

LEAD MANAGEMENT

You worked so hard for them. You can’t drop the ball now.

  1. 25% of marketers who adopt mature lead management processes report that sales teams contact prospects within one day. Only 10% of marketers report that same follow-up time w/o lead management processes. (Forrester Research)
  2. 34% of B2B organizations touch leads with leads nurturing on a monthly basis. (MarketingSherpa)
  3. 15% of B2B organizations touch leads with leads nurturing on a quarterly basis. (MarketingSherpa)
  4. 9% of B2B organizations touch leads with leads nurturing on a daily basis. (MarketingSherpa)
  5. 2% of B2B organizations touch leads with leads nurturing on an annual basis. (MarketingSherpa)
  6. 46% of marketers with mature lead management processes have sales teams that follow up on more than 75% of marketing-generated leads. (Forrester Research)

EMAIL

Email is a where many marketers make conversions.

  1. Lead nurturing emails have a slightly higher unsubscribe rate (1%) than individual email sends (0.5%) indicating their effectiveness in removing unqualified leads from the sales funnel. (Hubspot)
  2. Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. (Aberdeen Group)
  3. Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. (Jupiter Research)
  4. Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts. (SilverPop/DemandGen Report)
  5. Lead nurturing emails generate an 8% CTR compared to general email sends, which generate a 3% CTR. (Hubspot)
  6. 80.8% of users report reading email on mobile devices. (Hubspot)
  7. Your most recent subscribers are the most likely to click through. (Hubspot)
  8. Saturday has the highest CTR at over 9%, while Sunday is second with just under 9%. (Hubspot)
  9. 6 am has the highest CTR of any hour. (Hubspot)

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social channels are a great place to build relationships that lead to lifetime customer value.

  1. 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form. (Aberdeen Group)
  2. 51% of the top 20% of B2B marketers generating leads through social media use social sharing tools, compared to the industry average of 39% (Aberdeen Group)
  3. Marketers allocate 7.6% of their budgets to social media. (CSO Insights)
  4. The best three lead sources for B2B companies are SEO (14%), email marketing, (13%), and social media (12%). (Hubspot)